A Florentine Lady Uses Confession to Arrange a Tryst

A Florentine Lady Uses Confession to Arrange a Tryst is a tale of erotic ingenuity in which a woman turns a friar’s reputation for piety into cover for the very affair he thinks he is preventing. Married to a wealthy wool merchant whom she considers beneath her, she wants a gentleman who has not noticed her to become her lover. Rather than approach him openly, she invents a story of his unwanted pursuit and makes the friar her intermediary. Each attempt to protect her supposed virtue brings the friar further into her confidence—and brings the actual lovers closer together.

The lady’s circumstances and design

The story takes place in Florence, described by its teller, Filomena, as a city fuller of cozenage than of love or faith. Its unnamed protagonist is beautiful, well-born, richly endowed with manners and intelligence, but married to a wool merchant whose work she regards as unworthy of a gentlewoman. Though he is wealthy and attentive, she resists his embraces except when she cannot refuse him. Her dissatisfaction is not simply a passing interest: she falls deeply in love with a gentleman of good standing, middle age, and a pleasing appearance, and cannot pass a night at ease when she has not seen him during the day.

The gentleman, however, does not recognize her feelings. She is too cautious to send a woman or a letter to disclose them, fearing the risks that might follow. Her opportunity comes from his companionship with a friar who is widely regarded as devout. She sees that the friar can serve as a go-between, but does not ask him to carry a love message. Instead, she approaches him in church to confess and constructs a story that will make him carry her meaning to the gentleman without realizing it.

Confession turned into a false accusation

In her first account, the lady presents herself as devoted to her husband and anxious to protect his honor. She claims that an unnamed, well-favored man in the friar’s company has been pursuing and watching her, appearing at her door or window and exposing her to suspicion. The description fits the gentleman she desires, but the accusation is invented: he has scarcely passed her house and has never pursued her. By insisting that she wants no such attentions, she gives the friar a reason to rebuke his friend while concealing her own wish to attract him.

The friar believes her. He praises her supposed virtue, promises to stop the man’s conduct, and turns the confession into an opportunity to ask for charitable support. The lady gives him money for masses for her dead relatives. When the gentleman next visits, the friar privately admonishes him for harassing a woman he has never even seen. The gentleman is astonished, but the friar will not let him explain. From the false accusation and the friar’s insistence that the lady is averse to him, the gentleman works out what is really happening. He pretends to accept the rebuke, then goes to the lady’s house. Her delight when she sees him confirms his reading. He begins passing through her street under the cover of other business, cautiously converting the friar’s warning into the beginning of their understanding.

Gifts, alms, and the friar’s unwitting assistance

Once the gentleman has understood her intention, the lady returns to confession with a more elaborate performance. Weeping, she claims that the same man has become bolder since the friar’s first intervention. He now supposedly passes her house repeatedly and has sent a purse and a girdle through a woman. She pretends to have rejected the gifts, then says she took them back lest the messenger keep them and misrepresent what happened. Producing the purse and costly girdle, she asks the friar to return them and reprimand his friend again.

The objects make the lie persuasive and give the plot a physical instrument. The friar, angered by what he believes is continued harassment, takes the gifts and assures the lady that he will protect her reputation. She then asks him to say forty masses of Saint Gregory for her mother and other dead relatives, claiming that they have appeared to her in distress. She gives him a florin. Her performance joins a fabricated danger to an appeal for the souls of the dead, while her gifts appeal to the friar’s appetite for alms.

When the friar confronts the gentleman, he displays the purse and girdle as evidence. The gentleman recognizes them, understands that the lady has arranged matters, and does not expose her. He feigns embarrassment, admits fault, and promises to stop. The friar gives him the purse and girdle, believing he is returning the supposed gifts to their sender. The gentleman is pleased both by the confirmation of the lady’s affection and by receiving the objects. He finds a way to let her see that he has them; she is delighted that her scheme has worked. Thus the friar, trying to enforce a boundary, becomes the means by which the lovers exchange a token and confirm their complicity.

The invented intrusion and the first meeting

The decisive opportunity arrives when the lady’s husband leaves for Genoa. On the morning of his departure, she visits the friar again and claims that, before matins, the gentleman entered her garden, climbed a tree to the window of her bedchamber, and had begun to open the lattice. In her account, she woke, ran to the window naked, and shut it in his face after he identified himself and begged her to keep silent. She says she held her tongue only out of love for the friar, but can endure no more.

This episode, too, is a fiction. The lover has not broken into the garden; the lady invents the scene to make the friar describe exactly how he imagines the gentleman might enter. The friar asks whether she is certain of the man’s identity, and she insists that she knows him. He condemns the supposed trespass but asks her, one last time, not to tell her relatives. He promises to restrain his friend and gives her permission to act as she thinks best if the behavior continues. She agrees to keep silent for this last time and leaves as though still angry.

The gentleman arrives soon afterward. The friar rebukes him with a detailed account of the alleged nighttime attempt: the garden, the tree, the window, and the time before matins. As the friar presses him, the gentleman gathers what he needs to know. He makes ample promises to appease the friar, then waits until the following night. The lattice is open, and he enters the chamber as quickly as he can. The lady has been waiting for him and receives him joyfully. The friar’s reprimand has functioned as an unwitting set of directions to the meeting place and its means of access.

The lovers’ escape from the intermediary

The lovers make their first meeting a joke at the friar’s expense. The lady credits him, in effect, for having taught the gentleman the way to her. They take pleasure in one another and laugh over the friar’s simplicity, also mocking the wool-hanks, teasels, and carding-combs associated with the lady’s husband’s trade. The humor turns both the friar’s moral authority and the merchant’s occupation into materials for their private amusement.

After this meeting, the pair arrange their future encounters without returning to the friar. They meet on many other nights with equal happiness. Their success depends on deception, but the deception is not merely an escape from discovery: it transforms the friar’s efforts to police the lady’s conduct into a series of inadvertent services. The story closes with Filomena’s playful wish that God may soon grant the same kind of pleasure to her and to other Christian souls who desire it. That ending deliberately unsettles the tale’s religious frame. Confession, alms, masses, and clerical admonition remain present throughout, but they furnish the machinery of an erotic comedy rather than correcting its course.